Unneeded men in a time of compliance

Abstract

There would be no escape for Mikhail Platonov in Nikita Mikhalkov’s Unfinished Piece for a Mechanical Piano (Neokonchennaia p’iesa dlia mekhanicheskogo pianino 1977) and Sergei Makarov in Roman Balayan’s Flights in Dreams and Reality (Polioty vo sne i naiavu 1983), as both protagonists struggle to exist in the reality that surrounds and stifles them. Like Laevsky, their Chekhovian predecessor from Iosif Kheifits’s A Bad Good Man (Plokhoi khoroshii chelovek 1973), they experience, as this chapter argues, a highly personal dilemma so pervasive in the era of Stagnation, even if the action of the second of these two films happens to occur at the turn into the 20th century. The films’ respective protagonists are forced to navigate two contradictory modes of behavior—one public, one private—and this duality sabotages their very sense of self: they behave bizarrely, act like utter buffoons in public situations, and ultimately fail to find a solution to the existential crisis faced by many representatives of the same social stratum of that time. This chapter’s cinematic analysis juxtaposes the two films’ antiheroes and shows how the absurdity embedded in these two films echoed the dreamlike reality of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and early 1980s, an era marked by the supremacy of falsehood, compliance, and passivity.